Michael Baraz
Passionate, innovative, curious, continuous learner,
information executive leading defining the art of the possible and aligning
strategy, capabilities, security, and privacy, leading and motivating people to
deliver successful, high value/high impact outcomes. Uses Design Thinking
to combine pragmatic business acumen with technical depth, transforming and
implementing scalable information governance, quality, strategy and
architecture, information management, advanced analytics, and cloud platforms
using proven and emerging technologies driving top-line and bottom-line impacts
in insurance, banking, financial, real estate, health, utilities, energy, and
safety organizations.
Core Competencies
|
ü Strategy and Roadmap ü Business Intelligence ü Data Governance Program ü Data Privacy and Security ü Cloud Security and Computing |
ü Data Quality and Profiling ü Metadata and Glossary Management ü Master Data Management ü AWS and Azure Cloud Analytics Platform ü Digital Transformation Leadership |
ü Team Building and Development ü Agile Scrum Project Management ü Portfolio and Program Management ü Stakeholder Engagement ü Ideation and Funding Projects |
Professional Experience
Head
of Global Finance Data Office (consultant) April 2020 – March 2023
Walgreens Boots Alliance | Deerfield, IL
Part of the Finance transformation executive leadership as
a change agent to reorganize department using SAP S4,
SAP BW, and the Finance Analytics Platform for executive leadership dashboards,
reporting, and financial modeling, advanced analytics, and data science on
Microsoft Azure with ADLS, Power BI, and Snowflake. Created data strategy, data
governance, and quality program, executive data council, “citizen data”
stewardship, enriched business glossary, provenance/data lineage, data quality,
master data management, data classification, data privacy, data standards, data
audit, compliance, and other uses. Implemented value-based demand management
process for intake, evaluation, prioritizing, funding, and staffing initiatives.
Acquired and implemented Collibra data governance and Ataccama data quality
tools for business glossary, report catalog, metric/KPI
catalog business rules, data quality rules, data models, architecture, etc. Accelerated
financial modeling, analytics, and other data consumers time-to-value with
monetization and innovative data products, while assuring compliance and risk
management as part of Business Process Improvement. Instituted data sharing and
entitlement controls. Capabilities provide $3-4M
annually in cost aversion on consulting projects alone.
Created the Finance Data Council to align strategies,
roadmap, and execution. Led a team of 6 direct
and 12 indirect reports and responsible for business and technical data
stewardship and SME activities in areas of the Finance business area.
Designed program to increase time-to-insights,
time-to-value, and time-to-market. Program in partnership with FP&A and Tax to cut 30,000 hours off report production
and 10,000 hours off preparation of returns, respectively, bringing more than $7M annually in savings.
Global
Head of Data Governance and Data Quality June 2019 – February 2020
AXIS Capital | Chicago, IL
Reported to Chief Data Officer. Reorganized
enterprise data governance and quality functions creating a hybrid
enterprise/federated operating model. Led 11 direct reports. Established
relationships with line-of-business functions and created workgroups to bring
value to data, aligning and negotiating within and across LOBs
and project teams. Created and developed data governance framework. Led team to
qualify, assess, negotiate, and purchase Collibra as a strategic data
governance tool to define, catalog, automate processes, profile, lineage
diagram, data policies, data sharing agreements, and orchestrate group goals
and execution, for internal and external (third-party) data. Instituted
performance metrics for governance and quality functions to validate success.
Created issues management processes and tools. Created privacy management
capabilities to identify, catalog, and tag sensitive data for GDPR, CCPA, et al,
compliance. Created service for all common reference data using MDM hub for
publisher/subscriber distribution and real-time web-services access; oversee
prioritization by business value. Successes of data initiatives improved
efficiencies of top-level financial operations saving 11,500 hours annually.
VP,
Head of Information Architecture and Governance April 2016 – September 2018
Gallagher
Bassett Services | Rolling
Meadows, IL
Reported to Chief Architect. Responsible
for the vision, strategy, and management of information assets, to enable
high-value data consumers and for the architecture, security, and
implementation of hybrid on-premises and multi-cloud platforms. Assure HIPAA
and GDPR compliance in claims, payer, and third-party administration in
worker's compensation (healthcare), commercial and personal lines. Prepare
readiness for CCPA.
Created data governance program to
support “citizen data” stewardship, enriched business glossary, provenance/data
lineage, analytics on data usage, profiling, security and privacy, compliance,
and other uses. Responsible for proposing, securing funding, and staffing
project. This approach accelerated realization of modelers, analytics, and
other data consumers time-to-market with monetization and innovative data
products.
Created cloud data strategy and led
design of a FISMA moderate cloud architecture to support a data lake from
internal and external sources on AWS using machine learning/artificial
intelligence, and text analytics. Full build-out creates a hybrid solution with
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and on-premises platforms with identity management,
single-sign on, and virtualized access services via web services and direct
access. Responsible for proposing, securing funding, and staffing project. Led vendors
teams implementing architecture. Co-lead on building
microservice architecture to exchange data within and with trading partners.
Technology Strategy Lead (Consultant) March
2015 – March 2016
State Farm Bank | Bloomington, IL
Organized and led team of five to create an information technology strategy
initiating the Technology Strategy Office to govern operational, compliance,
analytics, and business performance management systems. Developed a roadmap
that specified implementing an application integration hub, synchronizing
customer information and their transactions across the various banking service
offerings on the various vendor-managed platforms. The goal was to create a dashboard
so that a customer would see all their current account information in real-time
one place,
Enterprise
Information Architect (Consultant) May
2014 – February 2015
Underwriters Laboratories, LLC | Northbrook, IL
Led architecture for a complete
digital transformation, converting more than 100 years of engineering safety
tests to a library capable of generating engineers with guidance for new client
product testing. This was used in recommendation engine to develop test plans
and increase turn-around to customers by 5-10 times and saving weeks of
engineering. This delighted customers by enabling them to bring products to
market much more quickly and substantially decreased their costs. Developed
Enterprise Information Architecture to achieve the vision for engineers to mine
and leverage historical customer product test results stored in various
unstructured text and scanned-image documents in a Big Data Hub to unlock and
maximize reuse in customer product testing and component library and analytics.
Identified information capability gaps, defined and aligned Information
Architecture with other Enterprise Architecture disciplines, i.e.
Integration Architecture, Application Architecture and Technical Architecture,
and the management and governance.
Enterprise
Information Architect (Consultant) June
2012 – May
2014
JLL | Lombard, IL
Reported to Chief Technology Officer. Led information innovation strategy
and vision for enabling strategic biz value and line-of-business applications,
master data management (MDM), data integration, data virtualization, metadata
management, and governance, to allow operations teams to work across accounts
teams and platform. Working closely with CIO, develop IT innovation strategy,
gap analysis, roadmap, business case development and investment decisions and
support frequent mergers and acquisitions. Architect and engineer of MDM and
Data Integration hub synchronizing major line-of-business and enterprise
applications enabling and optimizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM),
Property and Markets with multiple global mission-critical applications.
Data
Governance Lead (Consultant) October 2011 – June 2012
BP
U.S. Pipeline and Logistics |
Naperville, IL
Responsible for developing the information strategy and vision for
aligning business strategy for global enterprise with strategic and
line-of-business applications, master data management (MDM), geospatial data, data
integration, data virtualization, metadata management, data quality and
profiling, data modeling, and data governance. Created gap analysis, roadmap,
business case development, investment decisions, and support frequent mergers
and acquisitions.
Data
Governance Program Lead (Consultant) February
2011 –
October 2011
Bank of the West, BNP Paribas | San Francisco, CA
Reported to Chief Risk Officer. Worked with lines of business leaders
to define a data strategy to enable regulatory and operational management and
analytics requirements. Defined and prioritized business needs and requirements
for EDW for credit risk and Basel II compliance. Used COBIT compliance
framework for auditability, security, risk management, and Governance, Risk and
Compliance (GRC). Developed Master Data Management approach using a federated
model, create a proof-of-concept. Led business and EDW team of 22 direct and
indirect reports to put data governance around financial, operational
and derived data elements. Created a conformed semantic model based on risk
architecture and business intelligence with analytics needs.
Data
Strategy Principal August
2010 – December 2010
Maven Wave Partners LLC | Chicago, IL
Data Strategy for Nike,
a leading consumer-products company. Co-lead in a business-driven strategic
blueprint for technology-based services that provide deep insights to consumer
preferences and behaviors based on inferences, affinities and correlations from
biometric devices and customer profiles.
Data Management Lead for CIT Bank, a commercial banking
institution. Performed end-to-end assessment of the enterprise and business
units' operational and reporting applications and data architecture. Created the
Enterprise Data Governance program with an executive council governing people, processes and tools to manage the program to assure data is controlled
in an assured accurate and timely manner.
Enterprise
Architect/Data Strategy (Consultant) February
2010 –
August 2010
American Access Casualty Company| Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Developed strategic capabilities within the IT department, advanced the
maturity of the department to provide scalability in systems, and improved
software development methods to ensure best practices in application and data
architecture for future capabilities and growth. Designed new application
server platform architecture with failover and load-balancing as well as
improved network and application security. Developed new application
architecture using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via web services.
Developed master data management (MDM) architecture.
Senior
Principal Data Architect November
2007 – February 2010
STA Group | Chicago, IL
Enterprise Information Architect consultant to Aetna Insurance,
Hartford, CT. Responsible for defining IT strategy and architecture in terms of
the enterprise capabilities in full lifecycle of use of data, assessing the
current state, developing a future state architecture. Created blueprints for
Quote and Rating, Claims and
auto-adjudication/auto-pay domains application refreshes.
Used MEGA enterprise architecture modeling tool to capture data architecture
and relate to systems. Created conceptual and logical models, used Universal
Data Model reference model.
Data Architect consultant to State Farm Insurance, Bloomington, IL.
Enabled enterprise Data Model management for entity-relational diagrams for
transactional systems and star schema models for data warehouses, defined
logical model standards, defined physical model standards. Created and delivered
course to select Data Warehouse team members, Agile for Data Professionals to improve, evangelize Agile to data
teams.
Chief Data Officer Certificate, Carnegie Mellon University
Object Management Group Insurance Working Group –
develop/maintain industry reference models (on-going)
Collibra Data Governance Center, multiple certificates
Global Business Services (GBS) 2.0 Hackett Group Accreditation Service
Management Certification
AWS Well-Architected Certificate
Certified Information Security Specialist, Data Management Institute
Certified Data Protection Specialist, Data Management Institute
Post-Graduate Studies in Data Science, Johns Hopkins University
Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance
TOGAF Enterprise Architect Certification, The Open
Group Architecture Foundation
Master’s of Business Administration (MBA), Florida International University, Miami, FL
Bachelor’s of Business Administration (BBA), Finance and Management Information Systems (majors),
Computer Science (minor), Florida
International University, Miami, FL